Re: [Evolution] Have I pushed Evolution beyond where it is designed to go?

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Sun, 2022-11-06 at 07:07 +0100, Mike wrote:
> Nov  6 12:36:39 blackbox evolution[11523]: Failed to add service
> 'News and Blogs' (rss): No provider available for protocol “rss”

        Hi,
I guess, and only guess, you managed to mix different versions of
evolution, even you claimed earlier you move backup between two same
installations, only between VM and bare metal. I guess you've mixed
things up because the "rss protocol" is a new thing in 3.46.0. It can
be a leftover after your experiments, I do not know, but the 'rss'
definition comes from a file in the system directory.

> Nov  6 12:36:44 blackbox evolution[11523]: ..... table Inbox has 30
> columns but 28 values were supplied

This one is another indication of the version mismatch, when you move
from a newer evolution to an older evolution. There is a migration
code, but it works only in the opposite way, from older to newer
version (or the migration was not executed, because the version stored
in the GSettings was higher than it was supposed to be). The above
error specifically should should be visible also in the GUI, when you
select that folder. It prevents showing the folder content, which is
one of the problems you face.

I suggest you start from scratch. Either as a new user, or clean all
the evolution settings and data, not only the ~/.config/evolution/.
Uninstalling the app will not help, this data is independent of the
installation, and, more importantly, some of this data is used by the
evolution-data-server background processes, which is shared with the
desktop or other apps. The background processes run as part of the GUI,
thus when you play with the underlying files, you need to make sure the
background processes are not running, and/or you need to restart them
when you are done with the changes, otherwise weird things happen. Note
playing with underlying app files is something you should not (usually)
do, it is expected to be harder to do it and you can break the app,
which is what already happened.

To start from scratch, see here what locations are used:
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/data-storage.html

Do not remove the GSettings (DConf) directory, it holds all your
settings, not only for Evolution. You can use something like:

   $ gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.evolution-data-server
   $ gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.evolution

to unset your modifications (I didn't try the commands, maybe the
syntax is slightly different). After this restart the machine and only
then import your data from the VM. If the both evolution versions are
the same on both machines, the same as the evolution-data-server
versions, then the restore should be flawless.

You can/should do another restart after restore, or run
`evolution --force-shutdown` to restart also the background processes,
though it should not be needed even on your ancient version.

        Bye,
        Milan